Sunday, September 19, 2010

Smaug the Magnificent


Eight o'clock this morning, the view from the first ring road, on the way to school. 

So much smog.  Some time last week I was talking to my roommate Patrick about how thick the smog was that day, and he said "don't you think that it was pretty hazy in Chengdu, even in pre-industrial times? Some of this is just natural fog."  "No way." I said.  He paused for a few moments and then said "well, I'm trying to be optimistic."

Yesterday Patrick went to the top floor of a hotel called the Shangri-La, and he said he could see some kind of big industrial plant with smokestacks producing thick black smoke.  He asked me why they would put a plant right in the middle of the city like that.  (Patrick asks a lot of questions.)  My guess was that the city probably grew in around the plant, which was probably built right after the damn communist revolution or something.  He said "so in Europe they build cities around churches, and in China they build cities around factories and oil refineries?" Which led to a discussion of danwei, which I stopped listening to because I was watching a dog cross the busy road, which was harrowing.

That reminds me of a conversation I had with Shutzer this summer when we were passing through one of a thousand small "charming" Missouri towns on the Great River Road.  Since I took two classes in the College of Built Environments I'm pretty much an expert on urban design and planning, and I like giving little mini-lectures on the subject to captive audiences.  I said something like "all these towns are built around railroad stations.  The railroad built this great nation."  But then we actually passed the center of town, and there was a big courthouse there, which was really gratifying to Shutzer, not only because I was wrong, but because it allowed him to go on at great length about a proposed history thesis that undermines all prior scholarship operating under the assumption that human beings came before human concepts.  "Before there were pioneers, covered wagons, railway depots...there was justice.  Wild justice, roaming the land."

What's at the center of the city? For amateur anthropologists, always a good question to ask.

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